Local History
(Grove's Tonic, and Other Tidbits)
Our neighborhood streets were platted (mapped) in 1923 by E.W.Grove Investments of St. Louis, MO. Grove purchased the hillside farmland from William Farr, who is said to have kept his gardens on level ground surrounding our home's property- now Garden Terrace- and his vinyard a hundred feet downhill- now Vineyard Place. Today's Farrwood Avenue honors this early caretaker's watch over the area.
Grove was owner of the Paris Medicine Company, the patent-holder of the first soluble "tasteless" quinine medicine which helped build the entrepreneur his fortune. He financed the remarkable Grove Park Inn (designed by Fred Loring Seely and bordering our neighborhood to the east) as an attraction for wealthy investors to entice interest in his north Asheville lots. The Grove Arcade- the nation's first "shopping mall" and still western North Carolina's largest commercial building- and the Battery Park Hotel were other Grove developments.
Our neighborhood's 1923 Grove Park Extension purchase documents required that all structures meet a minimum building cost, and there were many forward-thinking stipulations restricting certain deliterious types of commercial development and other uses detrimental to a residential neighborhood. The document reads like an enlightened zoning ordinance, faithful to the vision of a quiet streetcar suburb close to a newly-cosmopolitan 1920's mountain city.In 1990 our property became a part of the Grove Park Historic District and is listed in the National Historic Register. Your Terrace Cottage owners/hosts are currently spearheading the Historic District nomination effort for Norwood Park, the beautiful neighborhood adjoining our property.
Thankfully, one misguided stipulation in Grove's early document against "persons of color" and "other disreputable persons" has been replaced by a neighborhood of thriving diversity and complexity. Nowadays, Grove Park - and adjoining Norwood Park and Albemarle Park - are enjoying a spirited renaissance of renovation and community involvement that bodes well for the future of "our corner of Asheville."
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